Other factors, he added, included the 1999 rezoning, which allowed the current project to be built without any special permits or variances, as well as the two initial residential projects on the block, which "set the path".
(There are five other construction projects on the block, and Forbes.com's world headquarters is just two blocks away).
"The sidewalk gets very crowded," said Fretta Johnson, a department store clerk who lives in Bland Houses, a housing project on the block.
A two-building, 337-apartment rental complex beginning to rise on 23rd Street between 10th and 11th Avenues is the third, and the largest, residential project on the block since a 1999 rezoning of a slice of West Chelsea to housing from manufacturing prompted a development spurt.
The Durst Organization, developer of the recently completed Times Square office building at 42nd Street and Seventh Avenue and the owner of a portfolio of Manhattan properties, plans a new speculative project on the block bounded by 11th and 12th Avenues and 57th and 58th Streets.
In addition, there are six penthouses of 3,800 square feet to 5,400 square feet that are being sold as raw space at an average price of $700 a square foot. Louis D'Angelo, the developer of the building as well as of two smaller projects on the same block, said: "There's an enormous number of people moving back into the city.
It was, among other transportation projects, on the chopping block.
Young, creative people and longtime inhabitants of the area live in other Dorchester Projects housing; Gates lives on the block as well.
Construction on the house for Marion S. Amory Carhart at 3 East 95th Street was interrupted by World War I, and she died in 1918 before she could occupy the building, which was a linchpin in a projected colony of mansions on the block.
No fewer than four luxury condo projects, all on the same block of Bayard Street, are in various stages of completion.
He is not ready to say, however, if Western's controversial community-based conservation projects are on the chopping block.
